Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform globally, despite US sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies.
The Chinese tech megacompany launched its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that U.S. sanctions prevented Huawei from gaining more access to Google’s Android software to power its devices.
Most recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the best-selling device in China’s huge consumer market, displacing competitors such as Apple’s iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, which could pose a bigger threat to Apple’s sales in the country.
Huawei is now targeting international expansion and intends to spend 2024 developing the HarmonyOS native app ecosystem, including integrating the most popular smartphone apps onto its platform.
“We will work hard to build the HarmonyOS application ecosystem in the Chinese market first, and then, from country to country, we will gradually start expanding it to other parts of the world,” said Erik Xu, rotating chairman of Huawei, to participants in the 21st conference. Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week.
Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.
“In the Chinese market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99% of their time on around 5,000 applications. So we decided to move forward in 2024 to porting these apps to HarmonyOS first, with the goal of truly unifying the operating system and app ecosystem. We also encourage other applications to be ported to HarmonyOS,” Xu said.
According to Huawei’s rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of these apps are already being ported, and the company is “communicating with developers” on the remaining 1,000 apps.
“This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support from the industry and many application developers,” he said.
“Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of other apps – up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a true HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world,” Xu said. This number could reach up to 1 million applications in the future, he claimed.
According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS has seen strong growth thanks to the introduction of 5G smartphones powered by it, such as the Mate 60 Pro. The platform accounted for 4% of global market share in Q4 2023 and exceeded 16% market share in China, which Counterpoint says makes it the third largest mobile operating system in terms of handset sales, behind Android and iOS.
Whether there will be a significant market for HarmonyOS devices outside of China is up for debate: repeated sanctions and negative publicity from the United States and European governments have left the brand with a hill to climb, both in the world of business and in that of consumption.
On a related note, this weekend US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo chose to downplay Huawei’s achievements in delivering 5G smartphone products such as the Mate 60 Pro, despite US sanctions against the company. The device is powered by a 7nm Arm processor developed in-house by Huawei and manufactured by Chinese chipmaker SMIC.
Speaking on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Raimondo rejected Huawei’s claims of technological advancement and said the capability gap between the company and U.S. companies showed that Huawei’s export controls White House to China were working.
This might have something to do with the launch of the Mate 60 Pro coinciding with Raimondo’s visit to China last year, which earned him mockery on social media. ®
“It’s years behind what we have in the United States,” Raimondo said in the weekend interview. “We have the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world. China does not. We have surpassed China in innovation.”
It also remains to be seen how long the United States can continue to outpace China as Beijing pumps funds into the country’s semiconductor industries. Earlier this month, reports indicated that Huawei was close to developing its own chipmaking equipment following restrictions on the sale of advanced lithography kits to China by ASML. ®
